Learn Usability: Online Class for the Society for Technical Communication
Looking to learn usability? Is your organization struggling to create usable websites, documentation, or applications? Are you getting a lot of customer complaints about your products or services and you’re not sure where to start? Guiseppe Getto, the President and Founder of Content Garden, will be teaching an online course for the Society for Technical Communication starting July 10th, 2018 entitled “Usability 101: What Every Organization Needs to Know.”
Why You Should Learn Usability
Usability is still one of the main factors in customer retention, customer acquisition, and customer satisfaction. Many modern-day consumers won’t buy from a poorly designed website. Follow-up content such as user documentation, troubleshooting, and how-to tutorials often determine whether customers will become repeat customers.
Here are some relevant statistics about usability:
- 70% of people won’t buy from or use a poorly designed website
- 66% of people make decisions about a brand based on a company’s website
- You have about 10-20 seconds to hook a new website visitor before they abandon your site
- 70% of people cite post-purchase content and support as a key factor in future purchasing decisions
Usability has long been an essential skill set for for technical communicators, but it’s core skill sets and best practices have changed radically in the past 5-10 years. Learn the best practices that UX professionals are using today and how you can apply them within your own organization to improve customer engagement and retention.
How You Will Learn Usability in The Course
This hands-on, interactive course will take you through all the basics of usability in a supportive, low-stress environment. Course members will be introduced to best practices in usability and will have the opportunity to try out their new skills on real-life problems they’re facing over the 6 weeks of the course. Each week will be capped by a 90-minute discussion of the learning from that week, including a Q&A with Guiseppe.
What You Will Learn in The Course
In the course you’ll learn:
- Understand and apply the core components of usability: learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors, satisfaction.
- Understand all phases of usability testing and user research, including identifying test users, conducting usability tests and user interviews, and analyzing results.
- Create an effective UX strategy for assessing your organization’s products and services on an ongoing basis to ensure maximum customer satisfaction.
- Understand how to analyze different kinds of UX data, from error logs to customer interviews.
- Develop personas for your users to help your design or documentation team keep them in mind in future product iterations.
